Class 1 - Week 10

For this week's assignment, i tried killing three birds with one stone. 1) walk with personality 2) 180 degree turn (overachiever suggestion from last week and continued into this week and 3) overlapping action revision. I never revised the Tailor animation from weeks ago that sucked so bad, so I came up with a little scenario to address all three issues.

Tailor's tail became a ponytail for Ballie, and a second Ballie does somewhat of an 180 degree turn, but slightly modified for story purposes. The Ballie with ponytail (and pink swimsuit) is obviously the personality walk, and it's so funny to me what people had to say when they saw my work in progress.

Because I was animating a girl character, they had all these notions of how a girl is "supposed" to walk. Very sexist and stereotypical movement was suggested to "fix" my walk. It was as if they thought the sex of the character should determine the movement instead of the personality of the character dictating the movement. Like it's "wrong" to present a girl walking with confidence and a long stride and a somewhat confrontational personality (all of this will make more sense when you see the animation).
So anyhow, enough of that soap box. For my blocking pass, I submitted it on 3's with a few 1's thrown in there where needed. This has been by far the most complicated setup I've tried to animate thus far (probably biting off more than I should, once again).

After a few weeks of studying between my other assignments, I think I'm actually getting the gist of that overlapping business (a little at least)! I found that I got better results when I was more conservative with the movement on the first tail segment. It actually feels more lively and fluffy and "overlap-y" instead of one big honkin unit like it did in my first Tailor assignment.

Studying Preston Blair's oversized book "How To Animate Film Cartoons" had some great reference of a squirrel tail that really helped me on this.